Pun aside, this was totally one of those games where I remember the word being out in elementary that this game was surprisingly good. It wasn’t til I was online in college that I was aware of the Gunstar Heroes connection though.
7 Likes
She just DM’d me on Instagram to find out what this game is called which one of you is her new boyfriend 
21 Likes
I kept meaning to tell you bro
7 Likes
I’m telling Mrs. Cuba you’re in deep shit
7 Likes
I’ve tried playing some Dirt Rally 2 because it’s sliding that I crave, but rally driving requires an incredible amount of focus and it’s very easy to fuck up and ruin a 30 minute session. I had one stage to go but because I kept hitting things I only had 2 working lights (out of 6) left, so any bump on the road meant that I couldn’t see during the final night stage. I eventually gave up because I was tired of driving the wimpy Lancia Fulvia.
5 Likes
also if you never played Deadfire despite my urging, Avowed is basically Deadfire 2 in terms of setting
1 Like
Yes this is one of the big things that made me not want to play it lol
1 Like
it was such a good setting after the first Pillars was terrible! idgi, it’s like night and day
3 Likes
Yeah Deadfire was a fun setting. And the game was really good too. One of the few good crpgs from that era.
1 Like
Obsidian’s best shipped game other than maybe Pentiment and it’s not close, just don’t play the turn based mode they patched in for some reason because it’s one of like 2 games ever made that gives you enough options to make RTwP combat good and turn based has horrendous pacing
The consensus seems to be that Avowed is slight but I honestly can’t imagine a better way of making a straightforward successor to Deadfire
4 Likes
I cannot emphasize enough how impressed I am with Avowed in terms of how snappy, weighty, and satisfying the combat and traversal/exploration feel. Really impressive work from a studio who’ve only made one game in this style before.
But as with The Outer Worlds, the writing undermines the thing for me. With Outer Worlds it was an overall flatness plus humor and political satire that just didn’t land. In this one, it’s just the flatness, the genericness. None of the NPCs or little lore scraps have endeared me any more to the Pillars world or this game in particular.
It’s a deal breaker for me. It won’t be for everyone! If I had more time to play games I would give this one more of a chance, since it does do many things very well. It’s just that I’ve come off playing a whole lot of Baldur’s Gate III and I’m having a hard time with run-of-the-mill fantasy that doesn’t also include an extraordinary playground of the type Larian makes. I need more indulgent, systems-driven freedom OR a more distinct and interesting narrative. If I was feeling these characters and these conflicts from the jump it would be a different story.
6 Likes
That’s not a judgment on Deadfire which I haven’t played, but that’s the point, it’s a sequel to this other very long game I haven’t played and probably won’t for a very long time so why bother.
1 Like
oh OK
1 Like
This has been making the rounds as the new HerRootObraIdol-like cryptic detective game, and it is something indeed! Solve an unexplained case through an unintuitive poorly-documented command-line file system! Some real, real good ideas in there, I highly recommend it.
13 Likes
This seems to be a particular issue with the pillars setting. It’s a very top-heavy kind of world building: all kinds of cultures emerging from the setting assumptions but none of it has a strong hook. None of it feels particularly relevant to your situation in the moment. I think PoE2 avoided this situation by just having such a pulpy, propulsive setup but both the first game and avowed suffer from a certain dryness. Its like reading a fanwiki for some doorstopper fantasy novels, a lot of proper nouns get spewed at you as if they’re the point of playing a fantasy game. It feels static because there isn’t really room for the player to get involved without a lot of careful planning from the writers.
In fallout you could walk into a town and understand the situation within minutes, you didn’t need to know anything about the history of vaults or the history of the khans or the corporate history behind the water chip. The setting is the situations and conflicts happening right now, not the backstory.
Pillars and Avowed is all backstory. Every situation is obscured by lore. It’s all striving to not be generic but its still so impersonal. Avowed is obviously made by fans of Morrowind, they even borrowed the set up of the game (agent of the emperor sent to distant northern fungal jungle colony) but where morrowind used this setup to allow you to explore and learn about an unknown place, avowed can’t let go of the known elements of the setting from the previous games. It expects me to have opinions on the imperial conflict between the rauataians and the aedyrans even when none of that has any direct bearing on the living lands I am exploring. I didn’t need to know anything about cyrodiil to play morrowind. Everything that happened in morrowind was colored by the rest of the setting but I could happily remain ignorant of it because the local conflicts and tensions were so apparent and enticing.
15 Likes
And I am still playing and enjoying avowed but its interesting that it repeats some of the missteps of the first game
The traversal and combat are both surprisingly good. I really like the level design, where every inch of the map seems to have been handcrafted to always hide something interesting. It’s keeping me going even if the writing leaves me cold (and I don’t think there’s any way to fix the setting)
M john harrison’s infamous critique of worldbuilding fiction applies to the pillars setting
an attempt is made to rationalise the fiction by exhaustive grounding, or by making it “logical in its own terms”, so that it becomes less an act of imagination than the literalisation of one. Representational techniques are used to validate the invention, with the idea of providing a secondary creation for the reader to “inhabit”; but also, in a sense, as an excuse or alibi for the act of making things up, as if to legitimise an otherwise questionable activity. This kind of worldbuilding actually undercuts the best and most exciting aspects of fantastic fiction, subordinating the uncontrolled, the intuitive & the authentically imaginative to the explicable; and replacing psychological, poetic & emotional logic with the rationality of the fake.
11 Likes
I think deadfire benefited a lot from the different colonizer factions all feuding together because they were all really well drawn and aspirational/malicious in distinctly different ways, and your main motivation to even understand and pacify them was to keep each of their emissaries in your party because they were more interesting than the other companions who were largely pillars 1 holdovers
avowed covers relatively similar territory but I don’t think I’d care as much without having played deadfire because the NPC interactions are a bit morrowind minus morrowind, it’s true
3 Likes
Deadfire is also directly about that conflict. Of course I should have opinions on the aedyrans and rauataians when I can see what they’re doing to people first-hand. It wasn’t lore in deadfire, it was just the situation.
At its best Avowed feels like a prettier, more polished cousin of Enderal, the Skyrim total conversion I like a lot. Would not be surprised if that was the game they all played at Obsidian when they decided to put the Pillars setting into a morrowind-like.
3 Likes
This was a great experience. I was really off base in my guess(my guess was everyone was puppets who were having their strings cut, so the deaths being caused by a trigger didn’t occur to me until after I’ve worked my way to the final event, then read the comments). Haven’t figured out the hangman.
After sleeping on it I think I worked out that the hangman Isn’t about finding the phrase, it’s counting down from 12 to a corpse, like the 12 people in the house dying one after the other.
2 Likes
This year I intend to work on a custom story for Amnesia The Bunker. And part of that work is doing research into how survival horror games create tense moments of gameplay, so I made a list last year of a bunch of those games I’d like to play for the first time or play again.
On that list was Onimusha, because of its clear lineage that relates it to Resident Evil. I played this short game via the recent remaster available on Steam, and probably came at it with the wrong expectation that it would be less hack and slash and, if not a survival horror game, then at least an overwhelming hack and slash. It was nothing like any of that though I did still enjoy myself. The combat system never really made complete sense to me in the four hours it took for me to finish it and by the end I was mostly impatiently slapping monsters with my fastest weapon, using ultimate abilities when I had the juice to expend on them. At times I felt like quitting just because it wasn’t really stirring much excitement within me, and I would only keep playing because I knew it was a short game. But in the end I am glad I played through it because it does have some remarkable qualities, like a Berserk-esque depiction of the cruelty of demons, and a RE3 level of prerendered devastation with background scenes of destroyed feudal manors and slaughtered samurai in burning rooms. And though it wasn’t the kind of experience I was hoping for, a mostly mindless button masher is still a decent enough time. Admittedly, I don’t understand why people love this game so, or what has lead it to getting a new sequel like. It feels sort of like a Dino Crisis situation to me, a spin-off series that is just fine but not really remarkable (except for one time featuring Jean Reno).
After that I started playing Pacific Drive. It has all the trappings of a rote survival crafting game, which make me weary. But there is a legitimately impressive atmosphere in this game and an intriguing level of systems-burden that it tasks players with managing, so I just feel like for my purposes of trying to understand how tense situations are created in games with horror themes this may yield something interesting to ponder. So far I like it about 70% of the time and then there is the other 30% where I reflect on what I’m doing and can’t help but wonder if I would like to do even more of that.
3 Likes